(PhysOrg.com) -- Neutron stars are the unimaginably dense corpses of what were once much more massive stars that died while being ripped apart in a supernova explosion. Their average density is typically more than one billion ...

Starting from the behavior of small flames in the laboratory, a team of researchers has gained new insights into the titanic forces that drive Type Ia supernova explosions. These stellar explosions are important ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A 25-year old astronomical mystery has been solved: Most of the diffuse X-ray emissions in the Milky Way do not originate from one single source but from so-called white dwarfs and from stars ...

A supernova is a stellar explosion. They can occur when a large star exhausts its ability to fuse hydrogen into higher elements, and its core collapses. The resulting rebound rips apart the outer layers of ...

White dwarfs are the burned-out cores of stars like our Sun. Astronomers have discovered a pair of white dwarfs spiraling into one another at breakneck speeds. Today, these white dwarfs are so near they make ...

I sat straight up in my seat when I learned of the discovery of a possible new supernova in the bright Virgo galaxy M61. Since bright usually means close, this newly exploding star may soon become visible ...

"Zombie" stars that explode like bombs as they die, only to revive by sucking matter out of other stars. According to an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, this isn't the plot for the latest 3D blockbuster ...

Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions whose brightness is used to determine distances in the universe. Observing these objects to billions of light years away has led to the discovery that the universe is expanding ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Dark energy is a mysterious force that pervades all space, acting as a "push" to accelerate the Universe's expansion. Despite being 70 percent of the Universe, dark energy was only discovered ...

Yesterday I talked about the Higgs, and how its discovery has led to a flurry of articles about how it might apply to astrophysics. So today here's another example, and this one's interesting because it's ...

Type Ia supernovae happen when a white dwarf, the "corpse" of a star similar to the Sun, absorbs material from a twin star until it reaches a critical mass—1.4 times that of the Sun—and explodes. Because ...

Researchers from Europe and the USA have ruled out a multitude of possible parameters for dark photons - a type of dark matter and energy - with the help of white dwarfs. In some aspects, the shining of these ...

Astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected gamma-rays from a nova for the first time, a finding that stunned observers and theorists alike. The discovery overturns the notion that ...